Reddit reviews The Letters of the Younger Pliny (Penguin Classics)

"The Letters Of The Younger Pliny" by Pliny the Younger.

This dude was some bigwig in Roman times. Ran a country that was owned by Rome. His letters are cool for a number of reasons, but some of the highlights are:

• First ever written ghost story in Europe (the poor soul had been denied a decent Pagan burial and wandered the house until they found the bones and performed the appropriate pagan ceremony)
  
  
• An eyewitness account of the eruption of the volcano Vesuvius which destroyed two towns (Pompeii and Herculaneum). Pliny's uncle set out to rescue people in a boat (and also to get a close-up view because he thought is was MAJOR cool). Never came back.
  
  > Of course these details are not important enough for history, and you will read them without any idea of recording them; if they seem scarcely worth putting in a letter, you have only yourself to blame for asking them.
  
  
• A letter to the Emperor asking what to do about these heathen Christians, and was Pliny doing the right thing by not executing them if they recanted and sacrificed to proper gods.
  
  Basically, it's a direct step into the life of a dude who lived 2,000 years ago. In his own words.
  
  K, kids? I know you and your rocking and rolling. But there's seriously hip stuff from ancient dudes too. Check it out, YOLO and so forth.

Sure! You can start with Pliny the Elder himself, then read his nephew, Pliny the Younger and the letters he wrote to people across the Roman Empire. Then The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbons is a classic - and much easier to read that it sounds like it would be.

For Ancient Greece, Read Homer's The Illiad and The Odyssey. Then read anything you can get your hands on by Sophocles, Seneca, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, Herodotus and Plutarch, as your interest leads you.

For the story of Alexander's campaigns, read the contemporary histories, The Anabasis and The Indica, written by Arrian.


My favorites are Pliny's Natural History, the letters of Pliny the Younger, Gibbons' Decline and Fall, Homer's The Illiad and The Odyssey, Arrian's Anabasis and Indica, and the medical histories of Hippocrates.

Have fun! It's a fascinating history, spanning centuries and continents. You'll probably want to get a summary history at some point, just to get all of these different time periods and major players in context. There are lots of them, so just look for something you find readable. What i love is being able to read about the time from people that were alive and writing then. Like when Pliny the Younger writes about his uncle, Pliny the Elder's, death while exploring the volcano that destroyed Pompei. It makes it feel like something that happened yesterday.

Found! https://www.amazon.ca/Letters-Younger-Pliny/dp/0140441271/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1517681712&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=pliny+the+younger+Betty+Raddice. Awesome. I will check this out!